Later Pizza

Later Pizza spent its first stretch handing pies out of a repurposed phone booth in a Collingwood back alley — a pandemic workaround that hardened into the whole personality. The booth is retired now, but the instinct that built it survives intact: order at a counter, carry the box a few steps, and eat the pizza close to where it was made. That counter now sits inside Endswell Beer, which means a Later Pizza order and a taproom pint share one roof and one visit. The pies themselves are New York-style — thin, foldable, sixteen inches across — and the kitchen handles them with more seriousness than a takeout box usually invites.

The dough carries the argument. It ferments for roughly forty hours before it meets the oven, which is where the crust gets its chew and the blistered edge that survives a fold, and the tomato sauce underneath it is made fresh every day. On that base the menu swings from disciplined to loud. Better Cheese keeps things plain — mozzarella, fior di latte, Grana Padano, oregano, olive oil — while Super Pep piles on Ezzo pepperoni that cups and crisps in the heat. The specials push further: the Blue Jays Special stacks Italian sausage with peppers and onions; BBQ Chicken Jockey runs pulled chicken under a chimichurri barbecue sauce; Crispy Mushroom layers cremini and portobello with fresh chilies and lands fully vegan. Bullseye Meat Lovers goes maximal — pepperoni, double-smoked bacon and barbecue sausage on a sesame-seed crust — while the Arrabiata takes the opposite tack, Italian chilies and crushed tomato with little to hide behind. Anyone who would rather steer builds their own, on a sixteen-inch New York round or a thick pan pie.

The naming is the tell. A kitchen this exacting about fermentation could have played the menu straight, and instead it writes pizzas called Legalize Pineapple — double-smoked bacon and pineapple, the old argument settled in favour of both — and Everything Canadian, finished with Timmy's Everything Spice in a wink only an Ontario table fully catches. Chimichurri turns up again and again, on the barbecue chicken and threaded through the Zucula with its goat cheese and marinated zucchini. The Caesar folds kale in with the romaine; the Pizza Place Chop Salad goes vegan under a tahini-herb vinaigrette. These are the moves of cooks who know the rulebook well enough to bend it, working a menu that still answers a plain craving for a good slice.

The origin explains the register. Later Pizza started in 2020 as a takeout project run out of the back of Bent Taco, when dine-in closures pushed a group of friends toward something they could sell through a window. The phone-booth pickup gave the experiment its folklore, and enough people kept coming back that the pizza outlasted the circumstances that created it, eventually landing a permanent home inside Endswell Beer. It reads as a Collingwood story more than an Italian one — something improvised in a hard year that the town decided to keep.

How it gets used follows from all of that. Later Pizza is pickup-first — orders go through Toast, by phone, or in person — but because the counter lives inside a working brewery, a box and a couple of pints quietly turn a takeout run into sitting down. The pies come sixteen inches and built to share, which makes the place an easy answer for a table that can't agree: a Super Pep for the purist, a Crispy Mushroom for the vegan, a Garlic Cheese Pan Bread with its garlic chimichurri to keep the peace. Carry all of it to a taproom table, pour a beer, and the pizza that started life in a phone booth ends up finishing it beside a brewery tap.